General relativity in electrical engineering

By Ulf Leonhardt, T. Philbin. SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics, 2006

677 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In electrical engineering metamaterials have been developed that offer unprecedented control over electromagnetic fields. Here, we show that general relativity provides the theoretical tools for designing devices made of such versatile materials. Given a desired device function, the theory describes the electromagnetic properties that turn this function into fact. We consider media that facilitate space-time transformations and include negative refraction. Our theory unifies the concepts operating behind the scenes of perfect invisibility devices, perfect lenses, the optical Aharonov–Bohm effect and electromagnetic analogues of the event horizon, and may lead to further applications.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3272a0691e1dee3c0d37707c1f8346ec56f34f1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Unusual resonators: Plasmonics, metamaterials, and random media (2007, background): “For instance, negative refraction and optical cloaking allow a natural representation in the geometrical formalism of general relativity (Leonhardt and Philbin, 2006).”
Spatial Kramers–Kronig relations and the reflection of waves (2015, background): “More recently the design technique of transformation optics [5, 6] has been a significant development, giving us a recipe for finding inhomogeneous, anisotropic materials (transformation media) that reflect no radiation whatever the incident field [5, 7, 8].”
Photonic topological insulators. (2012, methodology): “Metamaterials with this property have recently attracted significant attention in the context of “transformation optics” [ 35, 36, 37], and were used to emulate various phenomena of celestial mechanics in optics [ 38, 39] and to design optical invisibility cloaks [ 36, 40].”
Conformal transformation optics (2014, background): “There are three reasons for this suggestion: (1) the cloaked region has a perfect electric conductor boundary; (2) the design provides a symmetric structure; and (3) the range of refractive index distribution in physical space is feasible to implement.”
Transformation Electromagnetics: An Overview of the Theory and Applications (2010, methodology): “The transfonnation-electromagnetics design methodology is based on the fact that coordinate transfonnations operating on Maxwell's equations can be interpreted as inhomogeneous and anisotropic compression and stretching of the constituent materials in the original space [1, 2]. It exploits the prope”
On cloaking for elasticity and physical equations with a transformation invariant form (2006, background): “In fact such an invariance holds for the non-local bianisotropic electromagnetic equations as follows from a simple extension of an argument of Post [14] (see also Leonhardt and Philbin [41] and Schurig et al [42]).”